Open AccessThe disproportion of crowd wisdom: The impact of status seeking on Yelp reviews
Author(s) -
Chao Yu,
Drew Margolin
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
plos one
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.99
H-Index - 332
ISSN - 1932-6203
DOI - 10.1371/journal.pone.0252157
Subject(s) - crowdsourcing , crowds , variety (cybernetics) , representation (politics) , internet privacy , computer science , world wide web , political science , computer security , artificial intelligence , politics , law
This study shows that while status seeking motivates people to participate in crowdsourcing platforms, it also negatively impacts the bedrock of crowdsourcing–wisdom of crowds. Using Yelp restaurant reviews in 6 cities, we found that motivations of status seeking lead people to review a greater variety of restaurants, and achieving status further encourages this variety seeking as well as the targeting of more expensive restaurants for review. The impact of this individual-level tendency is confirmed by our aggregate-level analysis which shows that restaurants with higher price levels, higher uniqueness levels, and a larger percentage of elite reviews tend to obtain enough reviews to generate wisdom of crowds sooner than other restaurants. This leads to a different kind of distortion to crowd wisdom: an over-representation of status-conferring products and an under-representation of products that are not status-worthy. The findings suggest the importance of studying sources of distortion that are endemic to crowdsourcing itself.